Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100-119)
14 MAY 2003
MR ELLIOT
MORLEY MP AND
MS MANDY
BAILEY
Q100 Mr Drew: I will be careful how
I phrase this but I have experience of two incinerators and they
are sometimes fraught with problems, not in terms of the incineration,
although the smell is not anything wonderful, but in terms of
the movement in and out of vehicles. With the best will in the
world there are people who would probably stick an incinerator
in the most inappropriate place and they are fine to start with
but all of a sudden that becomes the place where people will offload
their dead stock.
Mr Morley: I think you are talking
really about a large scale incineration, a large scale business.
A lot of on-farm incinerators are quite small and they are only
used on occasions when they have some fallen stock. It may well
be, as I was saying earlier, that there might be a group of farmers
who wish to come together to have a larger incinerator which serves
a number of operations. In those circumstances it may come within
planning in relation to vehicle movements and also, incidentally,
it would have to be sited on a site where there was no livestock
if you were doing it on a larger scale.
Q101 Mr Drew: Who else could take
up this opportunity of incineration? Obviously hunt kennels, many
of whom have incinerators already.
Mr Morley: Some have.
Q102 Mr Drew: They could do it.
Mr Morley: Yes, there are hunts
that have incinerators and they operate as a business in various
ways. Although the Regulations do apply to hunts, if they wanted
to continue to take fallen stock, no matter what, they would have
to upgrade to the knacker industry standards under this Regulation.
Q103 Mr Drew: A couple more points.
In terms of the removal of ash, that is certainly some of the
criticism that has been voiced that I have had to deal with. Who
actually checks this? What is the process of removal? Where does
that ash go?
Mr Morley: Again, small quantities
of ash from small scale incinerators are dealt with by the owner.
I do not think the Regulations are—
Q104 Mr Drew: They can spread it
on their land?
Mr Morley: Can they do that? Larger
scale incinerators are regulated, they have to go to landfill
for that.
Q105 Mr Drew: What does a smaller
scale incinerator do with the ash?
Mr Morley: I think they could
put it in landfill as well.
Mr Drew: So they just send it off down
to landfill. Okay.
Q106 Mr Wiggin: Minister, talking
about the definition of foods, do you agree with the definition
your officials gave about sausages, that they are not food?
Mr Morley: I think that was a
rather unfair aspersion. It is not a question of defining sausages
as not food, it is simply trying to draw a distinction between
waste food products, which are covered by a derogation until 2005,
and raw meat, which is not.
Q107 Mr Wiggin: Are you saying that
you do not agree because, as I understand it, parts of slaughtered
animals, and for that I would think eyes, hooves, ears, are what
is meant by the sort of material that should go—
Mr Morley: That is SRM.
Q108 Mr Wiggin: Ears are not SRM.
Former foodstuffs perhaps that have been unsold are clearly very
different.
Mr Morley: Yes, they are.
Q109 Mr Wiggin: Unfortunately I believe
your officials have deemed that sausages are part of slaughtered
animals as opposed to former foodstuffs.
Mr Morley: It was not quite a
definition like that. It is simply that raw sausages do contain
raw meat and, therefore, they do have to be treated in a different
way in relation to the By-Products Regulation.
Q110 Mr Wiggin: I am going to give
you some sausages, Minister, because I think you need to think
about this thoroughly and carefully.
Mr Morley: I hope these are sausages
with no meat in them. I would be very careful about alleged slander.
Q111 Mr Wiggin: I am glad you are
so concerned, Minister, because if a small shop was to dispose
of one of these packs of sausages, just one packet each week would
cost them £832 a year. I suggest you very much think about
the definition.
Mr Morley: We are thinking about
this. We would treat a small shop with one packet of waste sausages
a bit differently from a giant sausage factory with skip loads
of the stuff. I come back to the point, Chairman, that we are
not being unreasonable or blindly bureaucratic, there is a question
of proportionality and risk assessment as well. I will be meeting
the various trade organisations in the very near future to talk
through some of these issues. We are not unsympathetic, it is
a question of applying the rules in a proportionate way.
Q112 Mr Wiggin: I am glad you are
going to meet these various bodies because I was wondering what
were the results of the Regulatory Impact Assessment that would
examine costs and benefits to the retail sector. I am surprised
that you have not done that already.
Mr Morley: We have done that,
which is why we are being proportionate and reasonable.
Q113 Mr Wiggin: So why are you meeting
them again?
Mr Morley: Just to reassure them
in relation to how they should deal with these issues and any
advice that we can give. I cannot take bribes, thank you very
much.
Chairman: You will be able to give them
sausages on sticks now, as long as you declare it.
Q114 Mr Wiggin: Can I just ask a
slightly different question about feral animals. There are all
sorts of animals that may or may not fall into the definition
of what feral is. There are wild boar, for example, in Kent and
there are pheasants, which I mentioned to you earlier, but also
things like badgers, which may well have died of tuberculosis.
What are people who find these, and perhaps even deer, supposed
to do?
Mr Morley: If it is a wild animal
they do not come within the scope of these Regulations. In the
case of a badger if it is suspected that it is diseased then the
SVS can be contacted and it would be incinerated in that case.
Actually we would probably do a post mortem on it as well because
we are doing post mortems on any road traffic accidents of badgers.
Q115 Mr Wiggin: The person who finds
it presumably has to remove it?
Mr Morley: They are under no obligation
to do so. If they wanted to bury it, they could bury it because
the Order does not apply to wild animals in these circumstances.
In the case of a badger which may be diseased, if they drew it
to our attention then if they were worried about the disease we
would deal with that.
Q116 Mr Wiggin: I refer the Minister
to the story in the paper about the man who was bitten by a badger.
Mr Morley: No, we do not deal
with Boris the mad badger, that does not come under DEFRA really.
Q117 Mr Wiggin: I think it should.
Mr Morley: I have many responsibilities,
Chairman, but mad badgers is not one of them as far as I know.
Q118 Mr Mitchell: There is Boris
the mad backbencher, of course! I am sorry. I have just a couple
of questions. The British Retail Consortium say that DEFRA officials
recently suggested that all foodstuffs, and that would include
meat, would it not, would be included in the transitional arrangements
for the Animal By-Products Regulation. Why did DEFRA officials
change the advice that they gave on the transitional arrangements?
Mr Morley: I am not sure that
the advice did change really. I think there may have been a misunderstanding
on that because it was always clear from what was granted in the
derogation to 2005 that that did not include uncooked meat. However,
it is one of the issues I am prepared to talk to the British Retail
Consortium about.
Q119 Mr Mitchell: What will be the
treatment of the small shop, such as Mr Wiggin's pathetically
small shop disposing of one pack of sausages a week? If those
are going I have no tea for tonight. Will that be treated as household
waste or what?
Mr Morley: It could be in certain
circumstances.
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